The Specter of Weimar

Weimar Germany haunts democracies in trouble. The United States is in trouble today and, as a result, the question has arisen whether we are destined to suffer the fate of Weimar Germany. Those who profess to see such an analogy have rarely worked it out specifically and concretely. Yet the analogy is worth examining because it may lead us to a better understanding of what is—and is not—going on in the United States today.

If Weimar Germany merely stands for a democracy in trouble, however, it becomes too vague and general a symbol to do much good. Democracies may get into too many different kinds of trouble, and they may end up as too many different kinds of ex-democracies. Weimar Germany was a specific, concrete historical phenomenon, and it gave way to another specific, concrete historical phenomenon—National-Socialist fascism. Unless the analogy is pursued with some specificity and concreteness, it cannot be fruitful. And as soon as we try to be specific and concrete, the analogy gets into trouble.

It does not take too much searching to find a number of significant differences between Weimar Germany and the United States.

1) Heritage. Germany did not have a democratic past. American democracy is now 200 years old, the oldest in the world. Whatever the crisis of American democracy may be, and however flawed this democracy may have been in the past and is in the present, its roots are obviously much deeper than Weimar’s roots were. The dominant military, economic, and even a portion of the intellectual forces in Germany never reconciled themselves to democracy at all. To the extent that a country must call on all of its reserves in a crisis of democracy, and the deepest layers of those reserves are embedded in custom and tradition, the United States is clearly in a different position from that of Weimar Germany.

2) Economic. The final agony of Weimar was brought on by a catastrophic economic crisis. Is the United States faced with a similar economic catastrophe? There are as yet no signs of an American breakdown of Weimarian dimensions. The American middle class is not economically desperate, and the American working class is getting a substantial portion of the economic pie. If there are any desperate economic segments in American society, they are not the same as those which brought down Weimar Germany.

Even if a depression in world trade, now that the international monetary system has broken down, cannot be ruled out, the conditions of Germany in the early 1930’s and those of the United States in the early 1970’s are still vastly different. Germany was plagued by war debts and reparations payments; it was virtually bankrupt financially by 1931. The adjustment of the dollar can hardly resemble the fall of the mark; the American economy belongs, so to speak, in a different order of magnitude from that of Weimar Germany.

3) Youth. Weimar had a rebellious youth, and the United States has a rebellious youth. This is especially true with respect to students. But there the analogy ends. In Weimar Germany, the Right wing of the youth movement was much stronger than the Left wing, as those terms were understood then. In 1930-31, the Nazi student organization won absolute majorities in the student associations of twelve German universities. In 1931, a National Socialist presided over the German student conference and, as one historian put it, this victory represented “the first ‘seizure of power’ within a German social group.”1 In the United States, the student movement has been overwhelmingly “Left,” whatever that term means today. In Germany, the competition was how far to the Right the students could go; in the United States, it has been how far to the Left they can go.

4) Fascism. In Germany, there was an organized fascist movement ready and willing to take advantage of the opportunities brought about by the economic crisis. The Nazi vote increased spectacularly from 2.6 per cent in 1928 to 18.3 per cent in 1930 But the Nazi breakthrough of 1930 was made possible by almost a decade of organization and agitation.

Do we have a similar prospect in the United States today? If so, what is our analogue of the Nazi party? Is it the Wallace movement? That seems hardly the case, though we may have to wait a while longer to know the worst. In any event, we can scarcely consider the two movements very similar as they stand today.

5) Hitler. It is hard to imagine a Nazi victory without a Fuehrer. Whatever differences of opinion there may be on this score, few would wish to minimize Hitler’s role or the importance of such a leader for any successful fascist movement.

Do we have an American Hitler at hand? If so, I am not able to recognize him. And if the answer is “No, we do not,” the Weimar crisis is still farther away from the American crisis.

6) Anti-Semitism. In Germany, Hitler was able to tap a deep vein of anti-Semitism, extending from the upper-class nationalist Right to the lower middle class. In the United States today, Jews have been perturbed by the pro-Arab, anti-Israel propaganda on the Left.

The difference, whatever we may make of it, is marked. Some may wish to substitute blacks for Jews in the American crisis, but the analogy is a dubious one. The Jews in Weimar Germany enjoyed a relatively high status, and their persecution came as a shock to them. American blacks are struggling for a higher status, and they have been very much on the offensive to get it. I see little point in calling every form of oppression or persecution Weimarian; that term should be reserved for the specific and concrete form which oppression or persecution took in the Weimar period or which arose out of it.

I have mentioned these six differences briefly because I merely wish to point out the danger of loosely assimilating the Weimar crisis to the American crisis. In this respect, I agree with Professor Carl Schorske that “the fundamental differences between Weimar Germany and present-day America make analogizing a dubious game.”2 Weimar was not, after all, the first and only crisis of democracy; there were also the downfall of the Italian parliamentary system in the early 1920’s and of the French Third Republic in 1940. A crisis of democracy is not in itself Weimarian; it may bear some resemblance to a number of such crises; and all these partial or fleeting resemblances probably fit into an indigenous culture with its own unique historical and social synthesis.

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II

Nevertheless, the analogy between the Weimar crisis and the American crisis is tempting. It has come up increasingly, and there has even been some public dispute about how suggestive the analogy is Why. then, is it inviting? What warning does the Weimar experience seem to hold for the United States today?

Perhaps the most haunting similarity is military The Weimar regime was born out of a shattering military defeat It was blighted from the first by a “stab-in-the-back” legend. The defeat was never acknowledged by the anti-Weimarian forces in Germany, and its revenge became an obsession with them—first revenge internally, then externally

The evident defeat of U.S. arms in Vietnam is certainly not the same as the defeat of German arms in the First World War. Our experience more nearly resembles that of France during the Algerian war Still, the tact remains that the Vietnam war has badly shaken confidence in the American political and military leadership. A failure of this magnitude must be paid for. We have only begun to taste the bitter fruits of a bungled, shameful war. A war may be bungled without being shameful, and shameful without being bungled. Our leaders have contrived to achieve both. and the ultimate cost of this combination may be greater than anything we have yet endured.

Will we have something of a parallel phenomenon in the United States after the Vietnam war? The first signs of such a phenomenon have already appeared. We have been told by Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, Pacific commander in charge of the bombing of Vietnam in 1965-68, that the United States should have been “willing to apply the force we had available,” that we should have used our air power “to its full effectiveness.”3 This means, if it means anything, that we should have been willing to wipe out, if necessary, every man, woman, and child in North Vietnam, for that is what using our air power to its “full effectiveness” would have meant. We have as yet heard mainly from those who believe that the United States has used too much force in Vietnam; we may hear more and more from those who believe that the United States did not use enough force. If enough Admiral Sharps find enough gullible listeners, the country is sure to be in greater trouble in the future than it was in the worst phases of the Vietnam war.

The overtones here are uncomfortably Weimarian. At the moment, one cannot tell whether we will suffer a slight infection or the full fury of the Weimarian disease. Thus far we have received threatening omens and intimations, but we will be lucky if we get off so easily.

For the full Weimar treatment, one needs not only a lost war, a stab-in-the-back legend, a nation divided against itself between those who wish to learn from the war and those who wish to refight it, but also an economic depression on the order of Germany in 1930-33 and an existing fascist movement with a mesmeric leader to beguile the cynical, the desperate, and the despairing. The Weimar regime, after all, did not do so badly for a few years despite the early putsches and conspiracies. Strictly speaking, the Weimar crisis was located in the years 1930-33. If there had been no economic crash followed by the upsurge of the Nazi movement and its accession to power, we would not have had the particular, the peculiar, phenomenon of the Weimar crisis.

The Nazis were far more successful in winning over the unemployed, especially the unemployed youth, than in gaining the support of the employed workers. The number of registered, full-time unemployed in Germany increased from 1.3 million in the fall of 1929 to over 6 million in the evil winter of 1932-33 out of a labor force of about 32 million. Unemployment, it has been estimated, tormented one out of every two German families on the eve of the Nazi accession to power.4 The unemployment rate in the United States in September 1971 was 6 per cent of the labor force, with the rate for teenagers going as high as 17.1 per cent. The unemployment rate in 1961 was also 6 per cent, without much thought given at that time that it might be a portent of Weimarian disorder. But the rise in unemployment in the United States has become increasingly worrisome, though it is nowhere as serious as it was in the last period of Weimar Germany. If there is anything to the analogy between Weimar Germany and the United States today, the two most important symptoms to watch may well be the post-Vietnam stab-in the-back legend and the growing unemployment.

The analogy, then, finally rests on the transition from a democratic to a fascist regime by way of a lost war and an economic disaster. Weimar has haunted the world, as the French Third Republic has not, because it gave birth to the monstrosity of the Third Reich. Is there anything analogous on the American scene today?

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III

Some profess to see fascism already a fact of life in America, and others think that they can see it coming.

One radical Urban Affairs professor has attempted to give a preview of the coming American fascism. According to him, it must conform to a model based on the new conditions of “cybernetic technology, electronic mass media, nationwide urbanism, and a new structure of world power”—conditions which were lacking in Germany in the 1930’s. In the new “techno-urban fascism” there would be no need for certain elements which were previously regarded as inescapable earmarks of old-fashioned fascism. The American model will be “pluralistic in nature” with “no charismatic dictator, no one-party rule, no mass fascist party, no glorification of the state, no dissolution of legislatures, no discontinuation of elections, no distrust of reason.” Above all, it would be “faceless—without a single dictator or a single party.” We should also expect this “post-industrial fascism” to be characterized by “guaranteed minimum subsistence programs, expanded social security, improved medical care, and enlarged housing and educational programs.” In the international field, the new “ultra-imperialism” of a Pax Americana would seek full domination of the non-Soviet and non-Chinese world. It would at least be satisfied with something less than world domination.5

Whatever may be thought of this prognosis, it is surely not an American version of Hitler’s Germany. If our “friendly fascism,” as it is called, is not going to have a dictator, a single ruling party, a mass fascist party, glorification of the state, dissolution of legislatures, discontinuation of elections, and distrust of reason, it would seem to be only distantly related to the German model. After all, tyranny, repression, and militarism are not new. They have taken many different forms in recorded history. If fascism is to have any meaning, it should refer to a particular system of tyranny, repression, and militarism. If the American model is going to differ so much from the German model, it will be a different political phenomenon and should be given a different name. If fascism becomes an all-purpose term for repression, it will simply become another promiscuously used dirty word—and that is a sure way for a word to lose even its dirtiness.

What is most striking, however, about this American model of fascism is its uncanny resemblance to present-day America, which is presumably not yet fascist. Perhaps the author intended the horrible future to look like the present, only more so. In Germany, however unsatisfactory Weimar may have been, people knew that Hitlerism was different, and it did not take them long to yearn for the bad old days of Weimar as if it had been a lost paradise. Our friendly American fascism is evidently not going to be so different from our friendly American democracy.

Another radical sociology professor has evoked the specter of approaching American fascism. He assures us that “old-culture moderates or liberals will be given the choice, during the next decade or so, between participating in some way in the new culture and living under a fascist regime.” This ultimatum is not restricted to moderates and liberals for, he says, “nothing could be more old-culture than a traditional Marxist” The new culture is, we are told, “the somewhat amorphous counter-culture that is growing up to challenge” the old. We are faced with the new culture or fascism because “the middle is dropping out of things.” The old must surrender to the new “as gracefully as possible,” soon and without fuss, or it must accept the awful consequences. I am not quite sure exactly what the next sentence means, but here it is: “If the old culture is not rejected then its adherents must be prepared to accept a bloodbath such as has not been seen in the United States since the Civil War, for genocidal weapons will be on one side and unarmed masses on the other.”6

Just who is going to be responsible for this “bloodbath” and how it is going to be set off are not altogether clear. The general idea is, however, fairly intelligible. The “old culture” of the moderates, liberals, and traditional Marxists is going to be responsible for American fascism unless it embraces the new culture quickly and gracefully. Otherwise, the old culture will somehow be obliged to “accept” (not “stage”?) a bloodbath, presumably by military and police forces using genocidal weapons against the unarmed masses of the counter-culture.

One would imagine that, if fascism is again staring at us right here and now, the author of this apocalypse would tell us a little more about it. Instead, he saved his little intellectual bombshell for the very end of his book, a stratagem which rescued him from the responsibility of dealing with the problem more seriously. In any case, this is another example of a conception according to which the coming American fascism is somehow going to emerge from the “old culture,” not from new subterranean sources of evil rising to the surface in times of economic breakdown and despair, as they did in Germany.

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The “new culture” is invariably related to the “youth culture.” And the youth of every generation “are more likely to be right because they’re in touch with the times.”7 Those who believe this notion should be required to confront the German experience. Were the discontented German youth, especially the German students, right in 1931-33? Are they right today when they have gone over, as Professor Ernst Nolte puts it, to an acceptance of “the Communist mythology of World War II and the post-war era”?8 It may be argued that the rebellious American youth of today are not necessarily wrong because the German youth of yesterday were wrong. But can it be seriously maintained that there is something about youth in general “in every generation” which makes it the safest guide to what is right? If the German experience shows anything, it is that no idea or movement is right because youth or anyone else embraces it This kind of thinking—or rather non-thinking—shifts the issue from what is right to who decides what is right; there is no difference in principle between letting youth decide what is right and letting the Communist party, the Catholic Church, or the Nixon administration decide what is right; there is no essential difference between “in touch with the times” and the late, unlamented “wave of the future.”

A professor of economics has even determined the exact day that “fascism came to America” It was, he says, August 15, 1971, when President Nixon proclaimed the “wage-price freeze.” According to this version, the Nixonian “leap into fascism” was brought about by the end of the “free price system.” We are now living in a “horror” of “totalitarianism,” the worst of which is that no one else seems to realize it. This economics professor also argues that the freeze is “a fraud and a hoax,” that it won’t work, that it only makes the old system operate at its worst. In this case, one wonders why a “freeze” that does not really freeze, or controls that cannot control, should have such far-reaching consequences. But the real giveaway is his cry of anguish that “nobody seems to care.” If this act were even distantly related to the kind of fascism that came out of the Weimar regime, some people—probably a good many people—would care a great deal. If Mr. Nixon were really introducing post-Weimarian fascism, one test would be the Gleichschaltung of the New York Times, in which case this article attacking “our Caesar in the White House” would never have appeared.9

A California writer has felt the need to coin the term “parafascism” to describe the condition of this latest of lost paradises. He could not use the old word, “fascism,” he says, because “there is clearly a difference of kind as well as of degree between Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s and California in the 1960s’ and 1970’s.” Here we again have the open recognition that the Weimarian and post-Weimarian experience in Germany cannot be meaningfully transferred to the United States, and yet we also have the insistent urge to make use of the fascist analogy in relation to the United States, if only in a somewhat altered semantic form. As for “parafascism,” we are told that it is “less a disease of society than of the individual, less a case of public pathology than a case of private pathology.” The seedbed of this private parafascist disease is said to be “a life oriented to leisure,” that is, the leisure of the affluent. By this time, we are so far away from the Weimarian pathology, which was decidedly public and social and which had its seedbed in a life oriented to a different kind of enforced “leisure”—unemployment—that there is hardly any point in pursuing the analogy, whatever one may think of this diagnosis of California’s ills.10

None of these views needs to be taken too seriously. They are worth noting only because they represent a contemporary mode of fashionable thought which tries to establish some link between the United States today and fascism. For our purposes, the striking thing is that even those who push the analogy with fascism cannot bring themselves to go as far as an analogy with German fascism. Indeed, they start out by disclaiming any analogy with the fascism that came out of the Weimar regime. This usage raises the question whether they are not using fascism in such a different sense from its historical manifestations that they really mean something else by it. Just as any form of that good old word, “exploitation,” has become synonymous with “colonialism,” so almost any form of oppression and militarism is now being dubbed “fascism.” I seriously doubt whether any clarity of thought has been gained by this verbal transubstantiation.

The trouble with drastically redefining the term “fascism” is that the redefinition may be more apparent than real, more in the writer’s mind than in the reader’s. We may be told that American fascism has nothing to do with the German concentration camps, the German dictator, a mass fascist party, and all the rest. But the word is shocking and frightening precisely because it is historically linked to concentration camps, dictators, and all they imply. In the abstract, the word can be made to mean almost anything terrible or tyrannical. In reality, its familiar past lurks in the background and cannot be so easily exorcised. If the historical expression of fascism did not persist surreptitiously, it would have little utility as a term of ultimate condemnation and rejection of American life today.

Americans are not the only ones capable of this kind of reasoning. André Gorz, an advanced French thinker, has discovered that “life in the modern factory or office differs but slightly from life in the army, in a prison, or from life under a fascist dictatorship.”11 M. Gorz may imagine that this tells us how hard life in the modern factory or office is; another interpretation might be that life in the army, a prison, or under a fascist dictatorship cannot be all that bad if it is no worse than life in a modern factory or office. Here, again, fascism is not conceived as anything different from the present; it is the present.

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IV

The idea that fascism is merely an extension of the status quo was also popular in Weimar Germany, especially in Communist circles. It was one of those aberrations which made resistance to fascism more difficult by pooh-poohing the changes that fascism would bring about.

Weimar Germany not only had a murderous cult of fascism on the extreme Right; it also had a suicidal theory of “social-fascism” on the extreme Left. This theory was first clearly formulated in 1924 in response to events in Germany—the German army’s occupation of the states of Saxony and Thuringia, in which the Communists had entered coalition governments, and the collapse of the Communist uprising in Hamburg in October 1923. Its chief author was probably Gregory Zinoviev, then head of the Communist International, though the exact phrase was apparently first used by a German Communist, Heinz Neumann. During the reign of Zinoviev’s successor, Nikolai Bukharin, the term “social-fascism” was held in abeyance; it did not become the linchpin of Communist policy until 1929, when Bukharin was removed and the full-fledged Stalinist period was inaugurated. From 1929 to some time in 1934, “social-fascism” became the most strident, divisive war-cry throughout the Communist world; it was applied most remorselessly and at greatest cost precisely in Germany.

In brief, the theory of social-fascism held that liberal democracy, and especially Social Democracy, was the main revolutionary enemy. In 1929, the Communists took the position that the “social-fascists,” not the outright fascists, were going to usher in fascism in Germany. Later, social-fascism was charged with splitting the working class or with tolerating bourgeois regimes which paved the way for fascism, but the original version of the theory was far more extreme and revealing. In any event, the theory of social-fascism was based on the proposition that “bourgeois democracy” and “fascism” were merely different forms of the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” The only difference between them was that one form—bourgeois democracy—was “masked,” the other—fascism—was “naked.” The democratic form was said to be by far the more dangerous and detestable because it was supposedly harder to expose. The real enemy, then, was “democratic forms.” The theory of social-fascism, as I have tried to show elsewhere in more detail,12 was intrinsically designed to destroy the “democratic forms” of bourgeois society, not to hold back fascism as such. For this reason, the Communists still deluded and consoled themselves for over a year after Hitler had come to power with the thought that the fascists were doing them a favor.

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The theory of social-fascism was quietly interred by the Comintern in 1935, and one thought that it would never be resurrected. Lately, however, it has been showing disquieting signs of life in quite different circles and circumstances.

The prototype of the new version of the theory of social-fascism seems to be the idea of “repressive tolerance,” put forward by Herbert Marcuse. In his well-known essay, Professor Marcuse also used the expression “totalitarian democracy” and distinguished between repressive and “liberating tolerance.” The latter, he said, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.” So “liberating tolerance” turns out to mean anti-Right intolerance. Instead of the kind of false tolerance which he considers to be “the tyranny of the majority,” he called for the kind of tolerance which will be limited to small and, of course, right-thinking, if not Right, minorities.13

Whatever may be thought of this position, it is closely related to the kind of thinking that went into the theory of social-fascism. The theory of social-fascism erased the difference between liberal (or social) democracy and fascism; the theory of repressive tolerance virtually erases the difference between tolerance and intolerance.

If a movement suffers from too much tolerance rather than from too much intolerance, it might well ask itself whether there is something wrong with it as well as with the society that is able to tolerate it. The theory of repressive tolerance encourages such movements to blame society for what may well be their own weaknesses. Such movements virtually beg for intolerance to save themselves from being corrupted by tolerance.

Some people are hard to please. They used to complain that American society was too intolerant, and, indeed, there have been periods of disgraceful intolerance. Professor Marcuse, however, complains that it is too tolerant and that too much tolerance is the same as intolerance or repression. He argues, in effect, that it is necessary to have a good, just, and free society to achieve a non-repressive tolerance. But good, just, and free societies are hard to come by. If we had such societies, the issue of tolerance would not arise. It is precisely in humanly imperfect societies that tolerance is needed and should be valued the most. Yet it is precisely in societies where the never-ending struggle of good against evil, justice against injustice, freedom against tyranny can be carried on openly and even legally that Professor Mart use’s attack on tolerance is most pertinent and damaging One wonders what people in a truly intolerant society would think if advised that they should not yearn and strive for tolerance because it would be another form of repression.

In substance, Professor Marc use’s position boils down to little more than a plea for the dictatorship of a self-appointed, “enlightened” minority. The hidden premise is that this minority knows what is good for all of us; that it is in possession of a truth which enables it to distinguish infallibly between “regressive movements” and “progressive tendencies” (if not infallibly, who is going to be the judge?); that it would limit itself to intolerance against the Right; that it would not turn its intolerance inward against factions, heretics, and rivals on the Left (always condemned to extinction, of course, because they “play into the hands of the Right”); that it would not prove vulnerable to all the temptations and perversions of revolutionary elites in the past. No matter how Professor Marcuse tries to dress it up, his essential thought again suggests how hard it is to have an original idea. His “repressive tolerance” and “totalitarian democracy” are, in effect, no more than new labels on old goods. Four decades ago, similar goods were labeled “social-fascism.”

The consequences for the newest Left have been equally disastrous. This updated version of the theory of social-fascism has helped to estrange the New Left from all those who prize tolerance, just as the old version estranged the Communists from all those who prized democracy. The more extreme the Left is, the more it needs tolerance, and, yet, paradoxically, the more intolerant it is likely to be. Professor Marcuse himself remarks that “tolerance is first and foremost for the sake of the heretics.”14 But he reserves his tolerance for heretics of the Left. In substance, however, there is no meaningful difference between “discriminatory tolerance” and “discriminatory intolerance”; the operative term is “discriminatory.” There is no meaningful difference between “repressive tolerance” and “repressive intolerance”; the operative term is “repressive.” If tolerance and intolerance are equally repressive, the very meaning of tolerance disappears. All that remains is playing with words for the sake of a slogan that is, I believe, specious in theory and pernicious in practice.

These variations on the old theme of social-fascism encouraged the New Left to cultivate intolerance and to court repression. As if existing conditions were not bad enough, a Black Panther leader said not long ago: “Basically what we’re going to do is create conditions in which white folks are even going to have to kill pigs or defend themselves against black folks. We’re going to turn Yale into a police state.”15 They did not get white folks to kill “pigs” or turn Yale into a police state. But they did get “pigs” to kill some Panthers, and they did create conditions in which it was almost impossible for the Panthers to function. The Weathermen tried much the same tactics with the same self-defeating results. A Weathermen leader exclaimed: “Well, if it [the revolution] will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.”16 He did not get the revolution or fascism; he got a mortal crisis in the short life of the New Left. Both groups finally recognized that they were killing themselves far more than they were destroying anything else.

Thus, only by using words promiscuously and by fleeing from the specific and concrete historical reality can Weimar Germany and the United States today be made similar politically or socially. Weimar Germany had to come up from the depths; the United States has to come down from the heights. At some point, these two movements may seem to meet each other, as in the case of Weimar and the First World War and that of the United States and the Vietnam war. But even here it is still too early to tell whether the Vietnam war will breed a stab-in-the-back legend of Weimarian dimensions. The American people may rather heave a sigh of relief to get rid of the whole doomed, sordid business and want to put it behind them, as the French did after the Algerian war. A little of the Weimarian analogy may do us some good, to remind us that a democracy can commit suicide at the same time that it is being murdered. But too much of that analogy can only confuse and disarm us in a time of trouble. If America is heading for hell or heaven, it is probably going to get there in its own way and not in anyone else’s.

11 The quotation from Gorz rightly belongs to Professor Arnold Beichman (Freedom At Issue, July-August 1971, p. 4) who found it in Upstart, January 1971, p. 3 (published by the University Radical Union).

13 Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Beacon Press, 1965), pp. 82, 99, 110, for references in this paragraph. In has critique, Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic (Viking, 1970), Alasdair MacIntyre has also noted an analogy in Marcuse's thinking with the Communists' “social-fascism” but in a different connection (p. 77).